Approximation of Proximity: A Protocol

Something happens when we read together.

Not every text sustains the same intensity of collective engagement. Some texts carry little interplay, their movement less layered. They tell you what to think, and how to think. These texts can be skimmed, or better entirely avoided. There is no life in them. But other texts call you into relation. These texts ask to be read one sentence at a time, each word a shape the world can take. In the listening-touching of what cannot quite be formatted, with the conceptual force of what a thought can teach us collectively to think in the feeling-out of what grows between, we learn together how be in the shape its proposition takes.

For a text to be able to become a collective proposition, it has to carry minor tendencies. Something else has to move diagonally across it so that a collectivity can inhabit it. The minor can take the form of an side echo, a syncopation that keeps things moving without centering itself. Or it can be a relational pull that activates a concept such that it unfolds in more than one direction, at more than one rhythm. What a collective reading will open up is its latent reverberation, the way it courses across thought’s palimpsest. The minor is the incipient reorienting that moves the text into its becoming.

This needn’t be a philosophical text. Folks sitting around and singing together do it too, catching the lilt, the off-beat, moving their voices into a minor key; rappers do it, punctuating not the rhyme so much as what falls right before its cadence; storytellers do in the pause, in the active unsaid.

The minor moves the relational listening, catching the beneath of language. It is from here that a collective poetics begins to take shape.

In the reading of philosophical texts, the minor is that force through which the mood of the thought comes into shape. To catch the minor, the text must be entered at an angle, which is to say, without the presupposition of a given understanding. It has to be read from the lean of its own immanent composition, in the spirit of the thought that moves through it. To touch the minor, there can’t be an authority that formats it in advance - neither in the form of the author, nor of the general specialist. There can’t be an account, given from an external perspective, of what it means. There must instead be a curiosity for how it opens up thought, and a feel for how the thinker - every thinker, including its “author,” is moved to the limit of that thought, and is remade by it.

Process philosophy, because it starts in process, is a generative environment for collective reading. In the refusal of general category, without an overarching account of how the world works, process philosophy asks how process grows toward a force of form, and what happens when it encounters difference. To be in its modality, it is necessary for examples to populate the field. With every example, a new account of the pragmatic moves into its commitment to the speculative more-than. Thought must be directly experimented. But not, ever, in abeyance of practice. There is never any dichotomy between thought and practice, between concrete and abstract. It’s all about how and what else.

When read collectively, with care to how thought moves, process philosophy will by its very nature open up worlds, and with those openings, a mode of inquiry will spread that is tethered both to the philosophical thought and to the world that occupies it. In the careful collective listening as the text is read aloud, a subtle shapeshifting of the group will occur over time as it becomes palpable that there is no need for overview, no expectation of a “global” understanding, and that no one individual is responsible for holding the theory down. Because process philosophy moves through the figure of the example, the group practice will rally around the crafting of accounts, from the everyday, that allow the philosophy to flesh itself out. The example will come from a certain person’s experience, but it will soon be apparent that no example belongs to someone alone. Examples, after all, are prisms: they shine their crystalline surfaces in many directions at once. No one can ever get the full spectrum of them - they are too protean to capture in that way. They are not truths. They are tethers, active in relation. In the crafting of the example, which is itself a collective practice - an example always a knot for the re-entangling - the text remains an active participant. It beckons, like a friend, asking to be returned to, now in the light of what has been moved into collective thinking by the example, and read again. In the collective reading, the text is the relay for the texture the examples embolden. From example to text to example, the writing is returned to in the singularity of this reading moment, always in palimpsest with the text’s own time.

A world is nothing else than the enlivening of a lived inquiry. There is no gulf between thought and movement, between practice and all that pragmatically moves through it, speculatively. To read into the text’s resonances is to find another meaning for rigour, to be in the rigour of a practice, in the terms of its own immanent unfolding. It is to be awakened by that force that a text can bring to the living, to be attuned to the life that moves across it.

Another environment for thought that dances into palimpsest, opening thought to its outside, is a variety of black thought that directly encounters the proposition that “a blackened world would require more than actualization,” a writing that catches the rhythm of para-thought’s prearticulations (Okiji 6). This kind of writing might be said to be inhabited by an ethos of the paraontological refutation of the limits of being - the kind of thought that gets stuck in being. Fumi Okiji’s writing is an example of this, a writing that is as much jazz as philosophy, a writing that doesn’t seek to denote, to argue, to settle. Instead, along with so many others from the Black Radical Tradition, it engages a sidling, a weaving movement that can carry, at one and the same time, layers of wefts and warps that come tentatively together.

Du Bois famously said that “race is a problem for thought” (Chandler 2008si). Black study, in the mode of thought’s prearticulation, writes such that the thinking is heard in the collective individuation of thought’s multiplication. This is not work that unfolds thought, as though there could be a linear account of how thinking thinks. It is work that refutes the individualisation of thought, or, more so, that simply doesn’t get stuck at that impasse.

Collective individuation is used here in the Simondonian sense, where process itself is always considered transindividual (2020). Thought lives in the multiplicity of incipient inflexions, and in the dephasings of the transductions they occasion. There is no one way, no authority. Any individualisation of thought - the trapping of thought into an identitarian frame - results from the cull, from the enforced subtraction of what exuberantly exceeds the one-and-only.

Collective reading, when attuned to the movement of thought, when engaged in a listening not only to the words read aloud but to all else they expose in the detouring, learns to listen to the more-than that is thought’s outside. This includes the everyday stories of how we care for those we love, what gardens we planted, what heartbreaks we suffered, feeling these stories out collectively not as “extra” to the reading but as surreptitiously contained in them, in the excess only they could evoke. It is here that the more-than of actualisation Okiji leans toward in her attempt to think the limit of blackness can be felt, which is to say - it is in the more-than of actualisation, where thought touches the limit of thought, that reading begins.

This awkward reach, in angular incline, the voice lilting at the end of the sentence as if to ask, you know?, carries and amplifies a logic of approximation of proximity. Reading, thinking, living in approximation of proximity means being affected by how things come differentially together.

In and through this logic, which is by nature neurodiverse in its refusal to give in to the norm of mutual exclusion (“this is that”), I propose here to sidle the limit of thought’s expression in/as blackness, as heard in the emergent collectivity of process thinking.

+++

To read into the fissures of Okiji’s beckoning, to hear the call of more-than actualisation, hyphen added (because it is a question of a quality, of intensity, not quantity), is to learn to read in the acrossness of a world always growing with thought. It is to trust that the thinking is not already in the knowing, in the security of an authority (including an authorial re-centering). The collective approach, the procession, as Tonika Sealy Thompson might say, can’t be one of deciphering as though the terms could be accessed simply by looking closely enough, by being a good student. Black study, or minor study - the collective wandering of thought-feeling - is a haphazard movement that moves with lines of flight of a thought-feeling composing itself, attuned to not in the proper accounting of a text as learned once and for all, but in the acrossness of its improvisation, an improvisation that will require that it be encountered anew each time it is reread. And in the midst of this encounter with the text’s own texture, in the posture of hypothetical sympathy to all it can yield, there has to be a feeling that the writer of the text, too, is leaning in, trying to unfold, in writing, the account they need to think, and to think it further.

In that furthering of thought, a collective murmuration is already there in germ, in anticipation of a carrying forth. The author too needs to know that the thought can be taken for a walk, moved around the planet, held for a moment by a Kenyan friend whose house I know only from the zoom image where I often see pineapples, or by an Italian friend whose moods I have come to feel, at a distance, based on the pipe he is using at any given collective reading. This, is study.

To be in the study, in the concern of the event of coming together, for an hour, to read, is to commit to the sound of improvised tendency, to hear in the stuttering language of folks who read not in their mother tongue, or whose mother tongue slips across worlds, moving back and forth to re-taste a sentence, as we silently read alongside, how our silent accompaniment is itself layered by the interlaced parastrata of how we listen together. And with that collective listening, that attuning, we read into the comfort that we won’t, not today, and not ever, need to get to the root of it. We know, by now, that next week we will have forgotten where we were, exactly, so that when we come together again, the concepts will all have to be regenerated, collectively. Inevitably, past and current reading will overlap. Sometimes we will recall a sentence and remind each other that we’ve been here before. Or we will simply reread what we read last time and laugh when we realize we were here last week. But we won’t worry. New stories will be told, and we will remark, with some surprise each time, how good it feels to read it again. How good it feels to be in the reading together. Reading and feeling will not be disentangled - we will know, the longer we engage in the more-than of actualisation together, that it’s what happens between the lines that makes the difference. But we won’t become inadvertent in our care: we will keep collectively teaching each other that the lines as we read them, the sentences and the concepts they mobilize, are absolutely necessary too! This is not a practice of metaphorical engagement. We read for the singularity of what is before us. Because it’s this thickness, the environment, the weave that the concepts hone and carry so generatively, that gives us that elbow room to be in the dreaming together.

+++

“Th[e] principle of proximity or approximation is entirely particular and reintroduces no analogy whatsoever. It indicates as rigorously as possible a zone of proximity…” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 272-273).

Study awakens the approximation of proximity that pushes thought to a limit where thought and world are in continuous concrescence, and where what is crafted is not the form of a thought, but the angle of its ineffable potential.

A logic of approximation of proximity veers away from the impulse to separate things out. Anexact, it places things into differential alongsideness, attuning to what they produce in the defiance of their segregation. This radical sidling - radically empirical - makes relation the pulse. The “of” that brings approximation and proximity together - approximation of proximity - produces infrathin resonance, not consolidation. This means that any “is” - “black life is neurodiverse life” - cannot be read in the dominant exclusionary logic. It can’t be read taxonomically. “Is” joins, amplifying the conditions for what comes between: approximation of proximity attuned to the pulse of the relation, “is” its syncopating rhythm. From the middle, what emerges is not. In the maxim “black life is neurodiverse life,” what grows in the relation is a retexturing, a colouring into uneasy shape of both black life and neurodiversity, each changed by what uneasily teeter-totters in the palimpsest their sidling mobilizes.

Thought lives here, in teeter-tottering zone of proximity, imbalanced in relation. Thought is not what we do. It is what catches us in the doing. It is the minor force of what molecularizes the “we” too often assumed to be the “I” of thought. It is the becoming through which “we” is co-composed.

“All becomings are already molecular,” write Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 272). To say that a becoming is molecular is to recall that “I” does not become “you.” We never become something. Thought gathers us into a becoming that diffracts from any account of similarity. When thought (the thought of the outside, blackness as the limit for thought), becomes us, thought is detouring the very possibility that we could be thought, that thought could be we. This molecularization is black to the degree that it is absolutely resistant to imitation, or identification. It is not like anything else. Becomings never are. They are never metaphorical. Becomings are intensifications of zones of proximity, force-of-form always more-than form, in the shape of enthusiasm, exorbitant.

Blackness, in the more-than of actualisation, as the problem it will always remain for thought, carries the shape of this exorbitance, neurodiversely. It does so in the movement of a “critique of pure feeling,” as Alfred North Whitehead might say (1978). Blackness, understood here always paraontologically, which is to say, beyond the thought of being as organized and categorized by epistemologies of white capture, is not, cannot be limited to Black people. At the same time, it is, and will always be, motored by the blackness that Black people also carry as the exception that refuses, and is refused by the norm. Another way of saying this: normopathy, the pathologization that is whiteness and that whiteness wields, which is to say, colonial capture, in the name of the individual who is absolutely bounded by the promise of self-actualisation, who is held to the form he takes, that takes him, cannot, will never, catch or be caught by blackness. This isn’t a question of morality - it is not about good or evil. To think it is to operate in another logic altogether - a logic where the boundary of existence is not already given.

To shapeshift blackness into the quality of the movement of thought that most exorbitantly, enthusiastically actualises a poetics of relation, is not to say that all Black people are good. In transindividual dephasing, something else, another logic, has to be deployed in order to hear it: blackness is deviation of normative standard by dint of its never having been accepted by it. Because blackness cannot be recognized - re-cognized - it isn’t debased by self-actualisation. It’s not that it resists the shape actualisation takes through individualisation. It’s that actualisation has denied its existence, as a result of which so logic of self-actualisation can enclose it. Blackness is movement, not person. The pressure of normopathy and its neurotypical enclosures cannot capture it. They simply find no hold on it. This is what I mean when I say, in approximation of proximity, that black life is neurodiverse life.

+++

“Blackness is enthusiastic social vision, given in non-­performed per­for­mance, as the surrealization of space and time. Anticipating originary correction with the self-­defensive care of division and (re)collection, it goes way back, long before the violent norm, as an impure informality to come. It open and initiatory counterpleasures reveal the internal, public resource of our common sense/s, where flavourful touch is all bound up with falling into the general antagonistic embrace. […] In order to get a plain sense of this you have to use your imagination against the world, since in the world - that dream, that nightmare of dominion, overview and over sign - blackness comes sharply into relief against its negation” (Moten 2018: 241, my emphasis).

You have to use your imagination, in the general antagonism.

Stefano Harney speaks of possession as the mode of the general antagonism: “If you think about the way we read a text, we come in and out of it at certain moments, and those moments of possession are, for me, opportunities to say, well, how could this become more generalized? This sense of dispossession, and possession by the dispossessed is a way to think what Fred and I call the general antagonism, which is a concept that runs through all our work, as it runs through our sense of the world” (in Harney and Moten 2013:109).

In the general antagonism, the impossible is lived into, in dispossession. To be possessed is to be in the event’s possession, which is to say, its procession, dispossessed of what segregates, what partitions into enclosure. To imagine here, to imagine against the world, is to fabulate - to be in the act of legending, as Bergson would put it - in the time-pull of the power of the false (2010). The power of the false is quality, and the fierceness, that demarcates fabulation from myth, imagination from idealism. In the power of the false, the stories fabulation generates are repeated in the angle of their most ardent becomings, in the present of their necessity. These stories, in the retelling - think of Nnedi Okorafor - tweak the environment they populate to make room for the newly found shape they take. The trickster-force of their urgent retelling undoes any true-false binary. Something completely other germinates in the fabulation. Not myth, and beyond image, to be in the act of legending activates the more-than of actualisation’s own limit.

The power of the false, heard in a logic joyfully sidesteps mutual exclusion, lives in the totality of the paraontological, a totality that carries no separability for a truth-false binary to squeak in. There is only qualitative differentiation here, only anexact rigour, and never any measure to make sense of it all. Here, in the more-than of actualisation, what moves into untimely palimpsest is the force of fabulation’s trickster capacity to move into and through logics that sidle, in uneasy approximation, in the shapeshifting of all that has always been radical, and black.

The general antagonism is the shape the world takes when fabulation moves it into expression in riotous difference. There are risks. Undercommons of thought-feeling take provisional form here without the handholds property (and propriety) institutionalize. It’s easy to lose your footing, the baseline nowhere in sight. That’s why you need a group, or a group-subject, as Guattari might say.

Remembering, always, that there is no one-self.

+++

“Black exorbitance” (Okiji 2025: 6).

Collective study taps becomings. The group becomes a group-subject through those becomings: it is not an individual who reads so much as a collectivity that reads-between. Deleuze and Guattari speak of this as the “copresence of a particle,” a becoming defined as “the movement into which any particle that enters the zone is drawn” (1987: 273). A becoming is the improvisatory shape through which the germ-particle develops at the interstices of thought-feeling, in the riff that squats the concept. There is never a becoming of the one, of the some-thing. A becoming is always the way the germ of process pulses into its difference. Here, in the riffing of passage, the movement cannot be pre-determined. Nor is it “anything goes,” in “free association.” “Free” association, after all, lives in the predisposition of an account of freedom as given. The riff of the conceptual interplay that produces a becoming is not reducible to metaphor or analogy. It is a riffing from within the fold of relation, in textual intensity, with a care for how the concept itself weaves thought into activity. The riff grows with thought, in the thick of it, you know?

In the midst of an uncertainty that does its collective work over time, in the time of the event, the becoming a shared informality, the you know? not the site of individual confusion but the lure to collective experimentation, the group-subject practices how to be in the fabulatory excess of proximity. The question that pulls the you know? into collective expression is only ever a group utterance, an expression of what thinks in and as the excess of any one individual text or thought or individual. “We could also put it this way: Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a partic­ular zone of proximity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 273).

From here anything but a cohesive theory is born. What grows is not a general idea. What grows is a zone, a haecceity. The haecceity, the approximate quality of a thisness - you know? - takes on the relational force of a field in the unfolding, half said. “A haecceity is inseparable from the fog and mist that depend on a molecular zone, a corpuscular space. Prox­imity is a notion, at once topological and quantal, that marks a belonging to the same molecule, independently of the subjects considered and the forms determined” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 273).

+++

The general idea can only do one thing: reduce the group-subject to the subjugated-group (groupe assujetti), to use Guattari’s terminology (2015). The subjugated-group is all individual, all expertise, all flattened by dominant belief systems. In the name of authority, the institution speaking through it, the subjugated-group’s tone is always inflected by the paranoia that comes with wanting to have the last word. That last word is never actually the word of the individual itself. It’s the word of the normopathy that runs through it, and the whiteness that propels it. But the habit runs strong to make it mine, in the name of, of course. In the Guattarian lexicon, the subjugated-group reappears every time the formatting of institutional logic installs itself into a individual, resubjectifying it with its functionary logic. This resubjectification occurs in the certainty of being in the know, and in the weaponization of that knowing. When this happens in study, collective reading crumbles under the pressure of the group’s subjugation. With the subject-utterance, which is to say, words spoken in the name of the subject, where the of course reduces the group to a now collective paranoia (should I know?), any sense of what trembles at the interstices collapses into the veneer of intelligence. Soon the “you know?” becomes a “you see!” - the two tonalities as contrasted as could be - distantism hard at work, the establishing shot of the world coming at us from the distance of safe havens. We are at arm’s length, being told what we in effect can’t collectively see, because there was never a seeing that could be wrested so violently, so absolutely, from the critique of pure feeling. We wonder (silently) how we got it wrong, what is wrong with our thinking, accustomed as so many of us are to being in the neurodiverse offness of the world. Self-chastisement re-enters, further subjugating any potential for emergent collectivity, as we begin to be certain we have once again focused on the wrong thing, that we are just not getting it. And soon, there is no more joy in it. Overwhelm takes over, and the words blur into one another. Around us, we note that some folks are looking down, others are nodding, their faces blank. A sense of collective unease takes over as we palpably feel the collectivity splintering. This shuts down any and all potential for fabulation. Now the text has become a problem to solve.

Functionaries love general ideas. For them, a close reading - an entangled and curious and lingering encounter with a text - is a waste of time. They already know. It’s not that they don’t read, or that they are not smart. It’s that all reading is formatted to the method of thought through which intelligence (in its most normopathic frame) can most readily be tethered. It’s about translating across different thinkers, about being able to say, with certainty, how thoughts resemble (or deviate from) one another. There is a synthetic quality to this way of going about metabolizing thought. It’s not wrong, exactly. But it has a certain flatness. Too often, it generalizes about the shape of thought, the minor forces that move through it eclipsed by an overarching account of how it fits into the wider literature. Major tendencies are addressed, but often without the dance of the thought’s singular movements: how does this text move thought into the dance of attention? The shape of enthusiasm feels distant. In fact, there is no feeling, the aim to be as objective as possible in order to keep thought at arm’s length. To not be too swayed by it.

When resemblance is what a reading strives for, it presupposes that there is already something present to tether thought to. The example has no place in this scholarly manoeuvre. The example cannot be governed by an existing theory - it is too unwieldy, too protean. It also dethrones the scholar, who thrives from being seen to be at a distance from thought, alone, not in the collective mess of it. Not only does the example sound too improvised, and too quotidian - it can’t be thought by one individual alone: it needs the collective to come to life.

The example, in total subjective force, lively with minor tendrils, gives the pulse of practice to the thinking, thickens it, but also brings thought down to the earthy richness where it most thrives. In this way, it teaches us to think from the ground up, from singularity instead of generality. This approach cannot work for the functionary. The functionary relies on what is already at hand, in the pre-existing formatting of existence. In the “of course” of their generalizing set-up, their typical approach will be to tell you, in often intelligent short-form, what should have been obvious. What will be obvious, for those in the thinking-feeling, will be how whiteness does its work. This will be relayed through the certainty that the baseline for thought is generalizable.

Brian Massumi defines a general idea as “the sense of a category that subsumes particulars based on their possession of a common property” (2025: 85).

Possession is the fault-line. On the one hand, the functionary operates in the model of private property: he possesses thought, and models the possession of it.

It is the possession by dispossession that study relishes, the force of the relational field as spurred by the text’s more-than of actualization. Catching the joy of the more-than, moving the spark into the terrain of thought-feeling, can sometimes be enough to highjack the functionary’s obsession with private property, shutting them down. To do so, it’s good to have techniques at the ready that don’t re-center on the individual, but rather connect to the movements of thought themselves, in the exorbitance of any settlement. We have sometimes done this, in larger reading groups, with “processual operators” (in the form of humans) who take the pontificating discourse to its own limit by redirecting the edge of their thought back to the text. This has the flavour of - ooh! how interesting! where exactly was the text doing this? If you can get back to the text, and away from the generalizing segue way, often that can detour the imposition of the general idea, and the risk of the subjugation of the group.

There is a craft to this. It involves spooking the environment with all the minor tendencies at hand. Once the return to the text is staged, it is to the general antagonism that the group-subject must turn. It’s not about “getting it right” but about reconnecting to those intervals where the more-than is just on the edge of a schizz. In the best case scenario, this triggers fabulation, activating the differential of the present, shifting the focus from the self-styled expert to what is now budding on the sidelines.

Moten, working across Cedric Robinson and Nahum Chandler, thinks of this diffracted present where thought takes us on its detour as the “paraontological totality” (2013). Paraontology is the power of the false of ontology. It is not ontology’s other, in binary formation. Paraontology is the particle that zones into approximation, shifting the contours of any and all baseline that claims, in the nonchalant certainty of of course. You know?

In the totality, there is only relation. “Relation is an open totality evolving upon itself. In Relation the whole is not the finalit of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity. Let us say this again, opaquely: the idea of totality alone is an obstacle to totality” (Glissant 1990: 192). Any attempt to delineate between, to return to the sum of its parts, involves an incursion by the functionary. He will try it. But the relational pull of the paraontological is a deviating force, and in my experience whiteness can’t rub off on it. It does try, pushing up against the perception of its partition, only to realize there is no real pushback. Thought has moved on. The earth has shifted.

+++

The undercommons crafted by the collective reading is never fully protected from the functionary. Stagnation is what most often lets him in: that moment in the reading where the consent not to be a single being wanes, and the interstices get clogged (Glissant 1990). To keep the ecology in an ethos of difference without separability, to hone the conditions for the group-subject, thought has to be kept in the act. How it is thinking, what what the thinking provokes toward the affective field it generates, has to be at the forefront.

Consent not to be a single being is the propositional force of the poetics of relation. In the consent not to be a single being, the relational field is at play, its emergent ecologies the tonality of all that differences without separation. In the welter of the cacophony, there is no imperative to segregate, to evaluate. The orientation is not toward an end that could decide what should stand out, what is worthy of it. Another mood is prioritized, one that can carry the more-than of actualisation. In the teeming overlay of many intensities playing themselves out, thinking-feeling becomes the quality or the tone of a certain angling into existence’s exuberance. There is no final say, no one statement that tells it like it is, no certainty at all about what it’s all about. What there is instead is a thick, nuanced, collective feel for the richness of what is moving into thinking-feeling.

Thinking-feeling grows in opacity the more it takes the shape of an emergent collectivity. It is relation, infinitely unfielded. Totality expressed in paraontological anexactness. Anexact because approximate, in the zone of the haecceity it will teach us to become.

The reading is with us in the excess of consent that refuses to take being - as subject, subjugated - as the starting point. Thought is thinking us in the between of what is on the edge of the unthinkable, in the feeling. Language falters but we hold on to the concept, we work it, letting ourselves be taken over by it. More and more it is the little machine itself, the concept-as-motor, that takes thought with it, and in that journey, we, the group-subject, follow. A shape of enthusiasm grows and we find ourselves rhythmically returning to the shape it takes. The procession! Yes! The procession!

+++

Okiji: “How does one cultivate practices for what cannot be anticipated or prepared for?” (16).

“To place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 376-377).

The outside is paraontological, in disavowal of any notion of the interior-exterior. There is no separability here, no timeline that could sort itself out into a past and a future as mediated by a subject.

When thought is outside, it is in the mix, middling. A poetics of relation.

Deleuze speaks of the outside as the third axis in Michel Foucault’s thought (1986). “The third axis is the line of the outside. It is the axis of our confrontation with the absolute outside” (Deleuze 1986). The outside moves with Maurice Blanchot’s thought of the impossible, of the impersonal (1992). It is the liminal force of the preindividual in Simondon, the force of form of opacity in the poetics of relation (Simondon 2020).

The outside is force, not form. “What the outside describes in the first place is the relationship of force with force. The outside is the non-formal element of forces, it is the informal element of forces; the outside has no form” (Deleuze 1986).

As relationship of force with force, in Nietzschean will to power (in the power of the false), the outside amplifies what Foucault calls “non-relationship,” which is to say, relation of non-relation. Massumi defines relation of non-relation as how elements coming into relation come together in excess over themselves. “In themselves, they are disparate. If they are in tension, it is precisely as a function of the differential between their positions. It is as a function of their distances from each other. The factors do not actually connect. Their distance is enveloped in a field effect that is one with the tension culminating in the strike of an event” (2011: 20). In relation of non-relation a thirdness emerges that will always remain unaccounted for, and uncountable. Its measure always in excess of actualisation, the relation of non-relation is the more-than of relation, its artful yield. The coming into relation does not produce a sum of relation. Its thirdness is “an extra-effect” that does not connect into it’s “cause” (Massumi 2011: 20). “It comes into its own sheer individuality of occurrence: its little-absoluteness. The phrase relation of non-relation is a way of holding together, in the concept of the event, the differential status of its conditioning elements and the dynamic unity of their sheer occurrence as a little absolute” (2011: 20-21).

Relation of non-relation gives the contour of what an outside activates in the event. As the force of non-relationship - the opacity that Glissant calls a poetics of relation - it cannot be represented. Its logic is in excess of analogy, or imitation, and it is not a metaphor. “The hold over which there is no longer any hold.” (Deleuze 1986).

The outside is movement, but not reducible to displacement: absolute movement, bare agitation, rhythm in the feel. It is beyond metric, ex-site. “It is absolute distance. […] If the distant is more distant than any exteriority, it is closer, it is closeness itself. And if it is closeness itself, it is closer than any interior milieu” (Deleuze 1986).

The blackness of time, in procession, spaces involution, its shape topological, its (im)measure differential. “Possessed by a movement or pervaded by a movement” (Deleuze 1986).

In the fold, the paraontological totality is a prism that gives colour, tone, shape to a world, a life. No form can be given the life-living that flows through it. “The line of the outside is the oceanic line. What is the inside? The inside is the boat, it is the craft, the small boat. But what is the boat? The boat is a fold of the sea. The boat is the fold of the ocean. Wherever there is a boat, the ocean has made a fold” (Deleuze 1986).

+++

“Insofar as the outside prods us to think.” (Deleuze 1986)

The outside activates a limit for thought. No form of thought can be internalized here. Thought as interiority recedes, and in its place, the push of prearticulation - its force - reverberates through it. Thought trembles, heard in stutters, half-sentences, uneasy rebeginnings, laughter. You know?

“All I really want to do is practice this space of impossibility, this ‘black methodology,’ and extend an invitation of sorts— an invitation to an unfurl/enfold practice that you might already be engaged with” (Okiji 44).

+++

“They are not outside language, but the outside of language” (Deleuze CC 5).

“I cannot accept the conditions that attenuate the spectrum of possibility to that which must be found in this constricted canal. That tautological restriction is the condition of a state of affairs that makes it easier for us to contemplate the end of the world than to imagine a blackened one” (Okiji 94).

+++

Adam Wolfond’s concept of languaging, the dancing of language in the between and excess of denotation, and in the interplay of all that languages in the beneath of its prearticulations, resonates here. It is here, in the outside of thought, at thought’s limit, that thinking best connects to the particles of becoming active in the approximate field in overlay of blackness, process philosophy and neurodiversity.

This approximation is urgent. “[It is] easier for us to contemplate the end of the world than to imagine a blackened one” (Okiji). To practice here, to be in the collective resonance of a group-subject, in the ineffability of spacetime blackened, requires an attunement to how the normopathic squeezes into environments of collective expression, debasing them with its subjugated logic. Nonperformance, as heard in Moten, must be tended, “a nonperformance of the proper form” (Okiji 66). Nonperformance of the proper, in abeyance of any account of what it means to person, in propriety, is a release of a certain formatting of how the world beckons itself into form-force. To imagine a blackened world is to fabulate it, in the glory of the power of the false: “Their nonperformance is some criticism that releases what it criticizes. Their veer in the imperative to decipher is indecipherable” (Moten 2020).

What is nonperformance here, and how does it rally in the cleave of dread?

In his compelling book Dread, David Theo Goldberg speaks of dread as the “driving social sensibility in our times” (2021: 9). In the fascism of 2025, dread is certainly amongst us. And yet, doesn’t dread also, as an “unsettling of the given, the real, the true and false,” carry a certain normopathic tendency in its assumption that there could be a world given in settlement? Is this not a return to imagination in the form of resemblance, a return to a certain collectively assumed baseline? A past that was still cohesive enough for us to believe life could move through it freely?

“What if freedom is (a condition of) slavery?” (Moten 2018: 251).

“The burdened individuality of freedom” is the normopathic - which is to say white, colonial, capitalist - belief that emancipation into the mutually exclusive logics of our time is freedom (Hartman 1997: 115). In blackness, in the ineffability of its logic of relation of non-relation, where freedom and slavery “are each the other’s condition of possibility,” freedom’s promise is nothing more than a mirage of inclusion.

Dread emerges when freedom begins to be circumscribed for those whose emancipation into it was an expectation, where the normopathic baseline is self-referential, and the self is already recognizable as the whiteness that defines it. Dread is unsettling because it unsettles the very presuppositions upon which freedom is based, which is to say, its exclusionary status. When freedom is no longer a given, when those of us who have assumed it can no longer expect to be protected by it, dread takes over.

Dread is the mark of whiteness meeting the unfreedom in freedom, the burdened individuality of it. As “the mark of this moment, of its seeming inscrutability, its illegibility, where the improbable has become likely,” dread is a re-centering of self” in the face of what cannot be properly propertied (our existence) (2021: 27). The fact that “an incomprehensible and indecipherable extinction or disappearance could strike in a blinding second” reveals something about whiteness’s belief that the ineffability of the outside was never its concern (2021: 27).

Practices for the encounter with the outside are urgent: gathering around an example, in the indefinite grammar of practice, is a practice in itself. “Let’s listen to it together. […] Let’s say it’s a practice. Let’s practice. […] We have to work not to be alone together, not to be single in groups, either in the same room or in rooms of our own. It’s a practice, not a game” (Moten 2022).

In practice, in the more-than of actualisation, in impredictability, illegibility. Not dread. Not because it isn’t terrifying, not because we know how it will unfold, but because the ambiguity also opens up to the outside of thought where the more-than of consent not to be a single being lures processes into becoming, in the power of the false.

Dread unmoors whiteness. Blackness has only ever known unmooring, and like the process philosophy that moves into its zone of proximity, it already has a practice of asking how and what else? In paraontological totality, blackness hones not a place and time, but undercommon relationality. Here, in the conviviality of its unlimited study, it practices unsettlement.

+++

In the perpetual unsettling of settlement, blackness is not simply a deviation from the norm. It is a refusal of the pathology that sustains the norm.

Pathology is the general idea par excellence. In its symptomatic deployment, it persons both at the level of the personal and at the level of the state. Pathology builds colonies, and then it persons the police to secure them. In the pathologization, the individual comes to believe the habit it has become, and while whiteness is the shape it normopathologically takes, the so-called neurodiverse pathologies also lurk in its shadowy enclosures. Because neurodiversity pathologized is nothing other than whiteness personified.

This is not to say there is isn’t a symptomology. It is to say that a symptom is not an adequate relay to the diversity in diversity that opens neurodiversity to its infinite difference. How we differ from each other told with pathological applomb is only ever a partitioning.

We need a logic that can carry the both-and of difference to sidle neurodiversity’s more-than. That there are differences that make a difference is not in question. The how of classical autism diverges from the how of schizophrenia, or of ADHD. But we have to recognize that when packaged as diagnosis each how in spectrum is reduced and redistributed not toward difference, but toward the norm.

To say that black life, in approximation of proximity, is neurodiverse, is also to say that neurodiversity must remain unfathomable in the shape of thought it makes. Neurodiversity cannot be subsumed to the thought of being. That this makes it unbearable to live in the normopathic surrounds that enclose and partition, is not in question. There is no desire here to alleviate the pain of the weaponized ableism of the everyday, just as there is no aim to deny the daily violence of white supremacy. Racism and ableism keep the dominant system in check, neurotypicality its baseline. It’s the danger of segregating neurodiversity from the outside of thought, from the force of blackness, that concerns me. Locating neurodiversity in absence of black life and the paraontology it practices implies sidelining the rally of relational pacing that languages neurodiversely, reducing neurodiversity to a body schema that partitions it in separation from other modes of bodying. This tends to sequester neurodiversity within identitarian frames. These frames always, in the end, protect whiteness to the degree that they reinforce a baseline that can be meted out in the measure of a symptom. This enfolds neurodiversity in neurotypical frames: it reinforces the partitioning that separates out the inside from the outside. Neurodiversity is not that. It is the thirdness in the relation of non-relation for which there is no frame.

+++

Normopathy settles. The settling subjugates the group. Meetings must now be held to take into account the slowdowns, and map the future. Soon, these maps become settler accounts of how to property the world. Lots are priced, and in the propriety that governs the accounting, it doesn’t really matter - it turns out - whether it all adds up. That’s not the point. What matters is that the maps keep getting drawn to exclude, and violently deny, the force of the outside (that haunts them).

+++

Moten: “What if blackness is, in fact, abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational and infectious precisely insofar as it is the continual refusal of normative individuation, which is supposed to be the enactment of everything opposite to these qualities?” (2018: 255-266).

“Dread operates in the space of indiscernibility” (Goldberg 26).

In the continual refusal of normative individuation, per Moten, in the space of indiscernibility, something else grows: joy. Spinozist joy, the affective exhorbitance that cannot be claimed in any reducible form, that cannot be secured.

Because joy is always in excess of the delineation of emotion, it lurks infrathinly in the very same outside that generates dread. This is the double bind: blackness is the abject, that Kristevian horror that just can’t be contained (1980). But the abject is also the more-that makes the ground tremble, revealing not only its crevaces but its openings.

Might it be said, then, that the dread “we” feel is nothing other than the revelation that we are whiteness personified? That we never believed that what we took for granted - the sovereign state and its market-ready delineations of individuality, could put us under threat? That the dread is there because we always assumed we could count on the sovereign state and all it metes out in its image to secure us? That our colonial privilege was always there to settle the debate of who is on the right side of any given border, and so we assumed we would always have a right to remain where we are? That we are horrified, in resplendent whiteness, that what we’ve committed to in the spirit of normopathy, what we’ve given our-selves over to, is nothing that can be ultimately secured? Is the dread the shape our newfound insecurity takes? The realization that the white time we’ve taken for granted, that we’ve made our own, seeing the planet in the reflection of our mortgaged lives, with a firm belief in the ongoing regulation that keeps our property safeguarded, securing us in the knowledge of our individual rights, passports in hand, is endangered? That we dread losing the security of passage, which is to say, our right to trespass? And that dread keeps us in that abyssal logic, reigning over the land that wasn’t ours to begin with, in abject horror of the poetics of relation and the logic of approximation of proximity that refracts it toward other shapes and other worlds? Is the aesthetics of the earth, our blackened, blackening earth, not precisely what gets overcoded when the dread becomes the centerpiece?

+++

“The organization demanded for political legibility is frustrated by the movement of our inevitable, unreliable revolt, and yet even as this agitation is not necessarily organized opposition, it cannot but send tremors through the order of politicality, troubling Western thought, common sense and speculative, in its play within the volcanic crossings of possibility. This is a practice of revolutionary intoxication, and— to borrow from Jared Sexton— ‘there has never been anything else worth the trouble’” (Okiji 17).

In revolutionary intoxication, joy overspills. Intoxication: “to spill over (überspülen), to lose control of being” (Benjamin 1927-1934). Joy just can’t be contained, let alone captured. In the overspilling, joy leaks into the interstices, and you just can’t hold it back. As joy takes you over, it shifts the contours of any notion of interpersonality, spilling it into relation. In the eruption of relation of non-relation’s thirdness, an atmosphere sets in that colours the event, multiplying its openings. That’s why, as we read together, we find ourselves engaged even when we don’t understand. The engagement isn’t for us, for our own individual knowing. It’s for the collective momentum, for the belief that, in the rally, we will puzzle it out, not so much to understand it - as though it could be gotten once and for all - but to feel-into, collectively, how it moves us toward thought’s outside. “I am not quite sure what this means,” we hear ourselves saying, but we push further, schizzing the ecology with just one more example that takes the concept for a walk, in a tentative expression of what it might be doing. The example is taken up in relay, and in the joy of the more-than of actualisation, we find ourselves compelled by a collective leap we are taking, going with it, and as we do that, we give someone else the momentum they need to keep it moving, to keep the concept acting itself out. Because what we have heard, in the collective listening of the text voicing itself, is that language wants to dance. This is what a concept can do.

+++

A protocol, etymologically, means “first (proto) glue (col).” It is all about the stickiness of an unfolding.

A protocol needn’t be ordered. Its unfolding can occur in the geology of parastrata, layers intercalated. And its glue can be a stickiness, a relational knot curious about the tangle.

Benjamin’s account of intoxication is entitled Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline 1927-1934. As a series of protocols it proposes, in intoxicated prose, to be in the presence of an altered state of thought. The feel from the reading is that rather than giving an account of the overspilling of intoxication itself, what it does is give a feel for the meandering intoxication encourages in the languaging. In the allure of the perambulations of archive fever, beginning with highlights and impressions, its parastrata are such that there really is no beginning and end. There is no moment when the writer comes to a realization, or has some kind of final say about drug use. Instead, Benjamin’s writing is moved through by experimental curiosity in the field effect of perception unmoored.“Absolutely trifling disappointment at six sharp.” “Two stone-pines seem to be frisking about together.” “I have seen how one can fish in the earth when one’s hidden in the grass.”

In revolutionary intoxication, the protocol insecures the procession.

The earth moves against the world. And today the response of the world is clear. The world answers in fire and flood. The more the earth churns the more vicious the world’s response. But the earth still moves. Tonika Sealy Thompson might call it a procession. The earth’s procession is not on the world’s calendar. It is not a parade on a parade ground. It is not in the world’s teleology. Nor is the procession exactly a carnival played to mock or overturn this parade, to take over its grounds. A procession moves unmoved by the world. The earth’s procession around which all processions move struts in the blackness of time. And the earthen who move around, and move in earth’s procession, move, as Thompson says, like Sisters of the Good Death in Bahia move, in their own time out of time. God is so powerful in this procession that he cannot exist. Not because he is everywhere in the procession but because we are. We are the moving, blackened, blackening earth (Harney and Moten 2017).

In the impossibility of keeping up, in the earth’s procession, in the approximation of proximity of our and its movement, the protocol is not a linear directive. Where were we?

Opacity is not the opposite of transparent. Where transparency still believes that general ideas will lead us where we need to go, opacity has wandered off. It knows, the earth knows, that thought is not lingering where the saying has already been said, and where the thinking has stalled, infested with the pus of a wound too often worried. White supremacy will not bend toward the outside. It has no such powers of fabulation. Mortgaging our-selves there in a desire to skew it, to teach it, is to abide by its geography, and to shape oneself to its geometry.

What is called for is already moving, already elsewhere. Because it never stopped dancing.

+++

Race is a problem for thought.

+++

A protocol for study.